I recall my visits to Podlasie, a region on the Polish border with Belarus – the border which divides extraordinary, primeval Puszcza Białowieska, the oldest Central European Forest, in half. I first visited the Forest at the age of ten....
On 24 January it was announced that the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, would be suspending funding for all its programmes and projects. This followed a US State Department directive on 20 January ordering a 90-day pause...
‘In the spirit of the times and against the grain’: with the title of his introductory essay to Osteuropa’s centenary issue, the journal’s longtime editor Manfred Sapper alludes to the contradictory history of the publication, which in many ways mirrors...
Historians of ideas have in recent years been attempting to understand neoliberalism as a political ideology, from its beginnings in the early 1940s through its multiple permutations to the present day. One of the leading thinkers in this movement is...
Does Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology have anything to offer in a time of ‘democratic, social, economic and environmental instability’? Guillaume Le Blanc, the editor of a dossier in Esprit 3/2025 on the twentieth-century French philosopher, believes he does. In the philosophical...
I remember exactly what I was doing on the morning of 21 August 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. I was eleven years old, spending the summer in a cottage with my parents. From the hilltop I watched the column...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPSgT7BJNlY Groundwater supplies 65 % of the drinking water used in the EU. Europe has a great average performance when it comes to water infrastructures, and much of the continent is geographically lucky to have access to this resource. But...
‘I want to come to you and be silent for a minute or two.’ In the fourth of Hugues C. Pernath’s index poems from his 1973 collection My Countervoice, time is not just an expression of desire. Lines such as...
In its latest issue, Flemish–Belgian journal rekto:verso delves into the politics and aesthetics of fitness. From strength training and bodybuilding to pole dancing and yoga, it examines how fitness practices both reinforce neoliberal values and dominant beauty standards, as well...
Belgian journal La Revue nouvelle offers insights into the conflicts in Middle East. ‘Neutrality is neither possible nor desirable’, says the journal, but we can try to ‘better understand the context that produced these events’. In a dossier entitled ‘Moyen-Orient...
